You don't want to have a separate table for each user. That would cause a maintenance nightmare.
Try normalizing your data.... user table ---------- user_id cont_id user_name Contract lookup ---------------- cont_id Cont_Name Contract Column Lookup ---------------------- col_id col_name Contract table ---------------- user_id Cont_id col_id qty This should be a good start... Regards, Jake Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________________________________ Plutoid - http://www.plutoid.com - Shop Plutoid for the best prices on Rims, Car Audio, and Performance Parts. On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Jackson Miller wrote: > I am working on a program that is essentially a contact management tool for > multiple users. There are currently about 200 users and will be over 1000 > eventually. Each user may have between 10 and 500,000 contacts. > > Where it gets interesting is that each user needs to have the ability to > control the fields that it is storing for it's contacts. > I am considering giving each user it's own table for storing contacts. In this > scenerio I would provide a means for editing the columns in the table. > > The other scenerio is to have a table to store field names, their type, and > their default value and their account relationship. Then another table would > store the contacts for all accounts with an account relationship. A final > table would store relationships and values of contacts and the fields. > > I am mostly concerned with speed. My guess is that the first scenerio will be > faster as long as all the queries only search the contacts for one account > (i.e. one table). However I am a little concerned about having hundreds (and > eventually thousands) of tables. > > Does anyone have experience with this kind of situation? > > Thanks, > -Jackson > > -- > MySQL General Mailing List > For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql > To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
